Learning Lessons

I’m a firm believer that every crochet project is an opportunity to learn something new. So I’m going to start this blog with the lessons I have learned so far while working on this project.

Lesson #1: Yarn is forgiving. VERY forgiving. Let it forgive you.
Lesson #2: It is okay to start over.
Lesson #3: Plan ahead.

This all started when my friend requested a specific image for a blanket. I scoured the internet for a pattern but alas there was none in existence. So I decided to make my own (this is the point that most people would say, turn back!) I went to an awesome website called knitpro.com where I uploaded my image and they created a graph of a pattern for me. It was up to me to determine how many stitches per block. Talk about a headache! But I hate to say no to a challenge :)

As you can probably guess from my “lessons learned” my first few attempts weren’t so successful. At first, I thought I would complete each section of the afghan and piece it together. But that would mean I would be working with pieces that would be the entire length of the afghan and I was concerned that the chance for error was too great. So I decided to work it row by row which means I’m working with five yarns at one time. Which gives me another headache…or at least a lot of tangled yarn.

My first mistake was to plan out my afghan based on the first row and hope that it would all work out. It didn’t. I have had to rip out my yarn back to the beginning more than once. I’m not kidding about yarn being forgiving. However, I think and I’m mostly confident that I’m finally on the right track. As of right now I’ve completed eight rows of 128. Maybe that doesn’t sound like much, but a tip I learned from LionBrand podcast, Yarncraft is how to plan out your project so that you can complete on time. I have eleven weeks to complete my project. That means I need to finish 11.6 rows a week. Round that up 12, I need to do two rows per day with a one day of grace. So at this rate, I’ll probably finish my project early :)